Are You Being Served?

I was having dinner with a friend last month, and he mentioned that he started watching the sitcom "Are You Being Served?" (BBC, 1972-85) when we were teenagers... because it was the only thing on during the local news (11-11:30p) before "Late Show with David Letterman" or "SNL."  I never watched, but I remember having that same dilemma (which meant I usually just read until SNL started; for Letterman, we wore out a VCR taping the show and re-watching after school each day).

"Are You Being Served?" aired its first episode as a regular series on this date in 1973.  I recently learned about two "AYBS" programs which may not even be known to most fans of the show...

1) The pilot episode aired in 1972 when the BBC was scrambling for filler programming during the Summer Olympics, when terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes. It aired once and then, according to John Inman in this special, the BBC wouldn't pick the show up unless his character (Mr. Humphries) was dropped. Somehow, he got to stay (fans can fill in this history, I'm sure) and the show became a huge hit. The pilot was thought lost for years, then finally discovered (in black-and-white) and included on the DVD sets. In 2009, the BBC used new technology to recover buried color signal information on their tape of the pilot, and it's now been uploaded "in colour"! The DVD is still black and white, however...


2) The other piece of this puzzle is "Beane's of Boston," an Americanization of "AYBS" (with a very similar set) from the producers of "Happy Days," and starring John Hillerman (Higgins on "Magnum, P.I."), Charlotte Rae (Mrs. Garrett on "Facts of Life") and Alan Sues from "Laugh-In." So bizarre! This unsold pilot was burned-off as a special in 1979, and is based on the episode "German Week" (considered one of the best AYBS installments).


Finally, here's a one-hour retrospective which aired January 1, 2010, and was followed by the colour premiere of the pilot.